The SoA Dean’s Office is delighted to announce that Fiona Campbell, a student in the MS in Urban and Community Planning program at the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment, is the 2026 Pratt School of Architecture William ‘Bill’ Menking Travel Award recipient.
Campbell will conduct a comparative study of affordable cooperative housing models in Barcelona and Berlin, traveling to each city to speak with residents, organizers, policymakers, and architects. Each of the housing cooperatives she has chosen to study “promotes affordability through sustainable building techniques and a democratic structure, with variations in their organization, land use, and finances,” she wrote in her application. Through her travels, she hopes to identify ways to adapt these models to affordable housing efforts in New York City.
Campbell’s research proposal builds on her previous work in the Urban and Community Planning Fundamental Studio last fall, which partnered with the Bronx-based advocacy organization Mothers on the Move (MOM). Campbell analyzed zoning regulations and land use and development patterns in Community District 3 (CD3) in the South Bronx. As part of the studio’s final report, which she and another student delivered to MOM’s executive director, Wanda Salaman, Campbell recommended adding a resident-led maintenance and preservation workforce to MOM’s current initiative using hemp-based building materials.
She plans to share her new findings with Salaman, as well as with the Pratt community and beyond. In her application, she referenced Menking’s “legacy of radical housing history and urban activism,” and noted that “this research comes at a critical juncture for New York City,” citing Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s goals to address the city’s affordability crisis.
“Upon my return, I will develop a blueprint for affordable cooperative housing in New York City, sharing my findings with Wanda and the broader Pratt community, including research on the financial structures, co-governance, and sustainable building techniques, as well as recommendations on how to incorporate hemp-based materials in construction,” Campbell wrote in her application. “This work contributes to Pratt’s ongoing research surrounding the implementation of hempcrete, affordable housing, and equitable urban spaces, and will serve as a technical resource for my peers, with documented case studies focused on cooperative housing and sustainable building for affordability.”
Campbell’s award comes after a rigorous application process with a selection committee composed of three faculty members: Professor Meredith TenHoor, Assistant Professor Yuliya Dzyuban, and Assistant Professor Mark Heller. The committee was tasked with reading applications and forwarding a shortlist of candidates to the Dean of the School of Architecture. We thank all the applicants for their well-developed proposals, and the care and passion with which the committee evaluated them.
Please join us in congratulating Campbell on receiving this award. We look forward to Campbell sharing her work with the larger Pratt SoA community.
More about Bill Menking and the award:
The William “Bill” Menking Travel Award is intended for penultimate-year graduate students in the School of Architecture for academic or internship travel outside of the United States. Upon return, the student is asked to give a presentation to the school community about their experience. And in recognition of Bill’s significant contribution to architectural journalism, they will write an article about their travels for the SoA news site.
Bill Menking was a much-loved member of the School of Architecture Faculty and taught for three decades at the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment (GCPE), where he led a history survey course. He taught in the Pratt Berlin Studio for several years. He was a longtime aficionado of Italian radical design and its collectives, such as Superstudio and Archizoom, and co-curated the 2003 exhibition Superstudio: Life Without Objects, a collaboration between Pratt Manhattan Gallery and Storefront for Art and Architecture. He founded The Architect’s Newspaper in 2003 with his wife, Diana Darling. In 2008, he curated the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale—an event he attended every year since its founding in 1980—and he explored it through his co-editing of the 2010 book Architecture on Display: On the History of the Venice Biennale of Architecture. He served on the Board of Directors at Storefront for Art and Architecture and The Architecture Lobby. In every position, his spirited enthusiasm for architecture and its possibilities radiated through his work. Bill had an incredible impact on the teaching of architecture and planning. He was passionate about interdisciplinary education and built connections across campus so students could understand the social issues in their fields and challenge the industry’s status quo and its institutions.
An announcement for the 2027 application cycle will be circulated early in late Fall 2026.